


Vita Brevis

by gidget_goes



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Thieves, Childhood Friends, Heist, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, childhood crush, childhood obsession with art history too but that's on me, i think it was inspired by backyardigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 10:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28469436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gidget_goes/pseuds/gidget_goes
Summary: “They think you have the painting,” Cloud surmised. “Well, do you?”Zack leaned forward, grinning from ear to ear. “We will once we’ve stolen it.”Cloud Strife has always felt that stealing is a lot like dancing - and as a soloist with the Midgar State Ballet, he's had quite enough of both. He's wary when a friend from his sordid past ropes him in for one last job, insisting that it's life or death. But as he struggles to navigate the breathtaking beauty and the death-defying deeds of his heist society, Cloud realises he may not be good enough to steal what he covets most of all: Zack Fair's heart.
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	Vita Brevis

“Aw, Cloudy, more flowers?”

“Oh, how . . . cute. Who’re they from? Sephiroth again?”

Cloud Strife sighed as grandly as he could, in the tight confines of his costume, and pushed the offending bouquet away from his dressing room table. It was quickly lost beneath the sea of the floor: the warring tides of discarded Bloch booties and empty bottles of foundation. The dressing room was sheer wreckage, with clutter crowding every available space, and the night’s red thread in serpentine tangles between discarded notions. There were sequins. Setting spray. Stolichnaya. _Sephiroth_. Cloud’s mental tally had begun to run into one long, snaky hiss, a minor modulation to the sibilation of hairspray behind him.

“Cloud?”

There was a pair of corps dancers hovering by his shoulder, wearing matching _Waltz of the Flowers_ tutus and belladonna smiles. Cloud did not know their names; nor did he particularly care to. It was _Nutcracker_ season, after all: new faces flurried through the corps, the Midgar State Ballet’s ineffable ranks weathered by a sudden storm of Snowflakes borrowed from the city’s dance academies and more-respectable strip clubs. (Well, that was just a rumour.) No matter how charming or talented Cloud was sure these girls weren’t, he didn’t see himself getting to know anyone who wouldn’t be staying with the company past January – especially not when he barely bothered with the dancers he’d worked with for years.

“Flowers are up next, by the way,” said one of the girls. “Sugarplums in ten.” The country boy in Cloud noted she had a slight accent, and for a moment, he let himself deflate against the stiff silk of his tunic. When she met his eye, he saw that her prim stage makeup barely covered a gaudy tattoo on her neck. By then he had to grin.

“Cheers,” he managed, at last. He bent at the waist to retrieve the flowers from the floor, and presented it to the girl. “How about you guys hang on to these? We’ll take out the card, and you can give ’em to Cid.” The ballet master, Cid Highwind, would give you a pack of menthols in exchange for unwanted flowers. He often loudly explained that it saved him the trouble of buying new ones whenever a new coryphée was hired or an old pas de deux partner had an inconveniently timed birthday. Cloud, a frequent recipient of many an unwanted armful of roses, had found himself flushed with more cigarettes than he could ever possibly have needed.

 _“You should sell them,”_ a friend of his had once said. _“To middle schoolers and stuff. They’ll pay prima.”_

The thought of her sent a jolt through his system, and he shook his head, hard, to clear the thoughts. Dimly, he heard an oversprayed lock of sandy hair _“tink!”_ as hairspray met tiara. The country girl barely stifled a snicker, and Cloud debated glowering. He was supposed to be dancing the Sugarplum Cavalier, not a half-melted Ken doll.

“You’re a champ” came the country girl’s sarcastic goodbye, and her friend gathered the bouquet close to her chest as the two of them scampered off to the wings. They were chattering animatedly as they ran; just before Mother Ginger’s crescendo of strings and woodwinds drowned them out, he heard one girl say something had been _“way nicer than usual.”_

He wondered if they were talking about him or the flowers.

Cloud had a tiny speaker perched on his table, broadcasting a live recording of the orchestra so that he wouldn’t miss his cue. Once, that might have meant thirty seconds before curtain, a shot of whatever blurring his lip-liner and a song of his own blaring from his earbuds. Now, Cloud had begun tapping out the other dancers’ choreo on the edge of his table, keeping effortless time to variations he would never need to learn. He wadded the card from the bouquet into the back of his phone case – sure, by now, of what it was likely to say – and dragged the stick of kohl across his eyes one last time, for luck. A few pictures were taped to his mirror, but even as they fluttered in the air, disturbed by his movements, he paid them little mind. He knew what ghostly images awaited him there, too: he saw them whenever he closed his eyes. There he stood aged seven, back in his hometown of Nibelheim, arm-in-arm with his best friend, her long dark braids wound over both their faces like moustaches. Beside the two of them, a fourteen-year-old Cloud gangled next to the dancer who had once been his idol, his braces as silver as the ballerino’s hair. Last, and (Cloud dreaded to think it) _not least_ , bright blue eyes and a crooked grin beamed brighter than the lightbulbs around his mirror – _too_ bright for a faded Académie Valentine flyer, the only picture Cloud had left of the two of them.

The card seemed to burn through the back of his phone, where he’d stuffed it, and the meagre contents of his lunch threatened to boil right through his stomach lining. Once more, Cloud shook his head. _Chin up,_ he scolded himself. _It’s your last_ Nutcracker _this season. You’re finally through._

And twenty minutes later, he was, with a thank-you cigarette tucked behind his ear and his dance partner’s lipstick marking a bright red target on the centre of his forehead. Though it was his last _Nutcracker_ this year, the company had a few left; as such, Cloud was spared the cast parties and elaborate curtain calls he still loathed, and was off for his two weeks of holiday in peace—

“Lovely as always, Cloud.”

_—Or not._

“Unwelcome as always, Sephiroth,” Cloud shot back. His voice was high and petulant in his ears, and as his breath fogged in the winter air, he watched the storm of his words part easily before his adversary.

Sephiroth was tall, especially for a dancer, and all six-foot-something of him cast a looming shadow over the stage door. His hair was long and silver – rumour had it he’d gone grey early – and cascading over the lapels of his charcoal overcoat, he had the gangling, metallic looks of a lamppost, propped uneasily up on the streetside. Cloud decided, then, that he was no longer a fan of lampposts.

“That was your last _Nutcracker_ this year,” Sephiroth went on. He wasn’t asking: he never did. This suited Cloud fine, because he did not feel like answering; his only response was to roll his eyes as Sephiroth gestured grandly behind him. “Fancy a ride?” he didn’t quite ask. A (silver) Rolls idled on the narrow street, its gleaming chassis stark, overexposed, against the slush staining the opera house’s back entrance.

“I’ve already called a car,” Cloud lied. Sephiroth was the kind of man who considered himself above shrugging, but Cloud watched his collarbone heave beneath the heavy shadows of his collar, turned up like a vicar’s.

“And here I am with a submarine.”

There had been a time when Cloud would have leapt at the chance to let Sephiroth take him home: when the offer was more promise than threat; when he would eagerly let himself be swept away by the whisperings of luxury car engines and bitter nothings. But Cloud had changed. Literally: he’d finally found his favourite sweatshirt, stuffed at the bottom of his locker, and swapped his split-sole Grishkos for a more practical pair of galoshes. So instead he folded his arms, and kicked at the curb.

“I should get going” was all he thought of saying. Sephiroth arched an eyebrow, bemused. In the light of the actual lampposts, a lazy flurry had begun to glitter, and fat snowflakes shone on the wool of his coat. Despite himself, Cloud found himself meeting his brilliant green eyes, made all the brighter by their colourless, lifeless surroundings.

“Let me at least thank you for tonight’s performance,” Sephiroth drawled. “You’ve gotten so much better sincel’Académie, haven’t you? Your tours en l’air are higher, and your turnout is better. I’d say you’ve truly . . . ” With a flourish, he procured a bouquet of flowers from behind his back. “ . . . Blossomed.”

Cloud’s first instinct was to scowl. The steam of his breath had settled like dew on his cardboard-stiff tongue, flattening any barbs he might have dared to make. But as soon as his cheeks had begun to burn in ire, confusion crept up behind it, spiralling through his system on tiny bourrées. Leaving Sephiroth to stand with his tacky GMO-red roses, Cloud fished his phone from his pocket, and cracked the note from his first bouquet out from his case. On cardstock stiff with perfume, elegant script thanked Cloud _“for his help with all this.”_ It was signed with a name he’d never heard before: Aerith Gainsborough.

He’d made it down three blocks before he thought to look up, snapped from his reverie by a tinny rendition of _Mamma Mia_ blaring from his pocket. His ringtone. The vibrations of his phone sent a thousand tiny shocks through the frayed wires of his muscles; his hands, heavy with fatigue, trembled as he fumbled for his phone – and began to shake in earnest as he saw the caller ID.

“It’s been two years,” he choked out, by means of _“hello.”_

“So it has,” said Tifa Lockhart. “But that’s . . . that’s not why I called.”

Cloud said nothing, letting static fill the silence – waiting for the lightning storm to build. Tifa’s heavy sigh came as a great thunderclap crackle, and Cloud could practically see her kicking at the floor, gaze both warm and cagey.

“Look, Cloud,” she finally began. Her voice was watery and faint. “I . . . I need your help.”

Saturday morning saw Cloud wedged in the very back of a bus north, the reflection of his bloodshot eyes almost invisible against the mist shrouding the warped window. Out of habit, he had neglected to pay for his ticket, and hoped his vantage behind a screaming, nuclear-reactor family might shield him.

The reactor was going off again, it seemed: one of the picture-perfect children had turned around to face him, her eyes quasar-bright above the black hole of her menacing smile. “Hey mister,” she said. “Hey! Hey mister!”

Cloud debated ignoring her, but doubted it would end well for him. “What?”

“I like your shirt.”

Cloud felt his cheeks run red. Unsure of what to wear on an occasion like this – unsure, still, of what the occasion was – he had opted for donning everything he owned. The Uggs and leather-jacket combo were eyesore enough without the lurid addition of a _Swan Lake_ sweatshirt, a tutu-clad Odette resplendent against a splash of bright purple. “Thirty sterling at the Midgar State Ballet gift shop,” he groused (though, of course, he got an employee’s five-finger discount).

The price of the merchandise did not deter her. “I’m gonna work there one day,” said the girl, matter-of-factly. “I’m a ballerina.”

“Quit dance while you can, kid,” Cloud huffed. He spread his hands in front of him, and heard his joints creak in protest. Green kino-tape made the world’s worst handcuffs where they circled his bony wrists. “’Less you want arthritis by age twenty.”

And that was the end of that conversation.

This soon after the December daybreak, remains of the clouds like cracked china over the horizon, the sunlight was weak. Still, it managed to cut a blinding glare across the roadside, throwing the landscape into an array of watery blacks and whites; skinny evergreens dotted the road like inkblots, and the snow turned the ground into leaves of paper, stories, epic librettos, yet to be written. The drive to the hamlet Tifa had specified during her terse phone call, Kalm – some gas-station-map-typo of a town – was supposed to take two hours. Cloud hoped that the roads would have come up with some stories worth telling before that time was up – something worthy of the score penned by his poorly-shuffled playlist, all disco and Debussy. But, he reflected, watching their tyre tracks and cigarette butts leave new scribbles on the papery snow on the road, Cloud would hardly be the one to star in that epic. Ticketless and finally free of his audience (children and raptorial retired dancers alike) Cloud hoped to be as insignificant as a snowflake, one of any million in a snowbank or the _Nutcracker_ corps.

That wish seemed as far away as civilisation was as the bus dumped him on the cobblestoned lap of the Kalm bus depot, and its backfiring engine sounded like a cackle. To call it a _“depot”_ was, perhaps, a bit of an exaggeration. Ascarce peninsula of flagstoned sidewalks rose from the slick black-ice sea of the asphalt, the snowfall like seafoam where it battered against the worn right angles. A few of the bus stops had leaning, green-copper signposts jutting like sore-thumbed sitting ducks from the flat expanse, but most didn’t. Most of them didn’t have any buses, either, and they certainly had no visitors. As near as Cloud could tell, he was alone – which was good – but also wholly visible, which wasn’t.

Instinct bade him to draw up the hood of his much-lauded sweater, and pull the drawstrings tight; he fought against years of classical training in order to drag his feet as he walked through the snow, scuffling the contours of his footprints. He dreaded solos and interviews with _Pointe Magazine_ enough: Cloud didn’t need a spotlight outside of the studio, too, even if it was only the weak glow of the bus timetable.

Tifa’s meetup spot was a stout country house, the kind that might be inhabited by well-mannered rabbits and beavers in waistcoats (or else a particularly xenophobic stripe of the landed gentry). The manicured lawn glittered blue with frost, and a Cubist visage danced across its surface, the bright white banks of shovelled snow toying coquettishly with yawning shadows and hedgerows. Rows of identical windows glittered like costume jewellery – or, Cloud realised slowly, like a dozen unblinking eyes. Resting uneasily on the balls of his feet, turned out into a lazy fourth position, Cloud took a second look at the cozy brick manor: at the hedges, brimming with thorns, hugging the edges of fences filed to razor points. Security cameras winked down at him where they were nestled in bee-bolls and balconies, scattering blood-red lights over his dainty steps as he worked his way across the slick flagstones to the double doors. Though his palms were too sweaty and his breath too tight to pretend he was calm beneath their gaze, Cloud was not at all surprised. He knew better than most that the rich were a paranoid lot.

The doors swung open before he’d made it up the platt, and Cloud struggled to pick details from the murk inside the foyer, its details ducking away from the stark sunlight outside. But after a heartbeat – a pinched, too-quick heartbeat – Cloud saw her: her dark hair a rat’s nest and shadows beneath her bloodshot eyes, and her brilliant smile gut-wrenchingly familiar.

“You came,” Tifa breathed. Then, student-athlete quick, she wrapped muscular arms around his midsection and hoisted him up high. “Oh, Cloud, you came!”

 _Of course I did,_ Cloud wanted to say. _I wouldn’t abandon you._ But the lie echoed uneasily in his mind, out of place even among countless other performances. Instead, Cloud wormed free of Tifa’s embrace, and stared very pointedly at the floor between his feet, where an unfortunately-placed puddle of meltwater had begun to seep from his shoes. “I missed you,” he mumbled. This much was true. Then, to dash the sentiment, he added, “I love what you’ve, uh, done with the place.”

“It’s not mine.” But when Tifa laughed, Cloud noticed a pair of ornate ruby earrings framing her grin, and knewat first glance that they were real. A matching necklace glittered at the collar of her Pearl Jam T-shirt – instead of on a velvet case at Sotheby’s, where Cloud had seen the piece last. She’d been busy.

But she only laughed again when he said as much, high and strained, and sounding about as genuine as the prime minister’s hairline. “Come inside, love,” said Tifa, after a beat. The muscles in her neck flashed bar-code shadows when they tensed, and there was a hint of hellfire to her red-brown eyes. “It’s cold. And we, uh, have a lot to discuss.”

“Like why you summoned me to this two-bit clachan?”

“Like what you missed in your two-year vanishing act.” Tifa spun stiffly on her heel, and began stalking down the foyer. “Tomato, to-mah-to.”

Though the sun had finally struggled to its midday zenith, its light was crammed into pockets and pinstripes, peeking halfheartedly out behind the shapes blocking the wide sash windows. What did manage to edge through fell in checkerboard squares on the teak flooring: a Cubist nightmare – Picasso’s heavy period. A long, thin shadow stretched across the floor, turning the checkerboard into snakes-and-ladders. A willowy girl sat cross-legged at the edge of a million-pound rug, poring over a laminated blueprint. She perked up as Cloud and Tifa approached, his shuffling enchaînement steps only just keeping time to her bouncing strides.

“Welcome,” she told Cloud. Her eyes sparkled much in the way real jewellery didn’t, and Cloud – contrary on his sunniest days – decided that she was altogether too _shiny_ , with her glossy chestnut hair and sparkly Lip Smackers smile; she was aggressively pretty, and aggressively visible.

Tifa cut her off with a delicate cough. “Where’s—”

“Getting pizza,” said the girl, pushing through the conversation with equal avarice. “Do you like pizza, Cloud?”

Sephiroth had once, as he re-pencilled his racially-insensitive _Bayadère_ makeup on between acts _,_ proclaimed pizza a fate worse than death: more dangerous to a dancer than glass in his Grishkos or lead-lined leotards. So Cloud nodded. He liked pizza very much.

The girl deflated, visibly, against her (shiny) satin nightdress, and pressed a slim hand dripping with (shiny) silver rings to her chest. “Good,” she said, sounding more earnest than Cloud decided he felt comfortable with. “Good, you’ll fit right in.”

 _With what?_ The question burned on his tongue; Cloud imagined sparks flying where he ground his teeth together. But he held his tongue, and folded his hands neatly as he forced himself to say, “Thanks.”

It sounded painfully lacking, and before the empty syllable landed, Cloud rushed to add on: chaining the other beat of the cabriole, before it all came crashing down. “For the pizza,” he stammered. Then, realisation rushing like an eighteen-wheeler to meet him, he added: “And for the flowers.”

Aerith Gainsborough nodded. “Took you a minute,” she teased. “But Tifa didn’t call you here for your brains.”

“So why _am_ I here?” Cloud couldn’t help himself, this time, and Tifa shot him a hapless look. She fell in on herself in obvious relief as a loud knock shook the walls of the house, rocking new waves in the marrow of Cloud’s tired bones.  
“Well, top o’ the mid-to-late-morning!” came a cry, so loud it fluttered the clippings on the windows. One, already losing the war it was fighting against gravity and off-brand Blu-Tac, whirled down to the floor just by Cloud’s feet. Before a gust of wind from the front door scattered it again, he could just make out the telltale grid of a strain gauge rosette. There was a part of him, buried deep beneath choreography and cold showers, that wanted to note that specific pattern of pressure sensors hadn’t been in vogue since bell-bottoms (the first time around). There was another part that hated himself for still knowing that, all these years later. And there was another part still that pushed him onto demi-pointe as he strained to catch the speaker’s idle chatter, clutching at every singsong syllable.

So many parts. So divided. But Cloud relished the spaces between those fractions, those cold, echoey caverns – missed them as wildfire ripped through them, filling their valleys with a smoke that fogged any semblance of rational thought he had left.

“They were out of pepperoni,” the speaker went on, finding Cloud incredibly interested in the papers scattred along the floor. “So I got us tempeh and hot sauce from the petrol station, and figured we could improvise.”

Had these words been paired with anything but six boxes of pizza and a smile brighter than floodlights, Cloud might finally have given into his misgivings, and left. But as it was, Cloud found himself laser-focused on the vision crossing the floor. Yes, he’d changed – a lattice of silver scars danced across his warm brown skin, and he had filled out, new musculature wrapped around the frame of the tallest boy in sixth year – but there was no mistaking Zack Fair, no matter how much hotter he’d managed to get.

“Class, Zee,” Aerith was saying. Cloud heard the clinking of china (only because he was raised to associate the noise with breaking mugs and imminent disaster) and saw her procure a legion of Wedgwood plates, all embossed with the seal of the Corellian royal family. He dimly registered Tifa pouring myriad foil packets of hot sauce into a solid-gold tureen, and wanted to wonder where she’d nicked it. But mostly, Cloud found himself lost in eyes bluer than sapphires and the sea and the screen his laptop got whenever he tried to pirate too many movies at once, and his tongue felt like cotton as he choked out, “You’re back.”

“So are you,” said Zack. Then, stepping gaily over years of maelstrom emotions to hover behind Aerith, and her perch on the sofa, he asked, “You remember Aerith, yeah?”

Cloud did not, at that moment, quite remember what he’d eaten for breakfast that morning, or what his mother’s name was. But as he blinked, blinked, blinked away the headache, he felt recognition spark between his nerves (rather like acid reflux). “The Modeoheim job,” he recalled. Aerith stared at the floor, hot sauce and blisters gleaming red against her white-knuckled grasp.

“We all agreed that those beavers were perfectly trained at the time,” she offered, weakly. Cloud thinned his lips, and sank to gather an armful of papers from the floor. The menu to the pepperoni-less pizza place was joined by the blueprints to the Neues Museum in Balfonheim and a pamphlet on Wutai woodblock prints. The wildfire dissipated from his nerves at last, leaving their frayed edges in cinders quickly extinguished by the leaden pressure of trepidation.

“This job won’t involve any beavers, will it?” asked Cloud. Zack flashed him a fleeting grin, and Cloud noted just as briefly that a single pearl earring sparkled by his cheekbone. His stomach dropped a shade lower when he saw its twin framing Aerith’s grim frown.

“It’s a big one,” she confirmed. The hot sauce tureen clattered against the intarsia table when Tifa slammed it down, her hands shaking.

“And we can’t do it without you, Cloud,” she insisted, her voice hot. “We need—”

“Need _what_!?” Cloud whirled on her, fists clenched. “A _quitter_? A washed-up has-been _quitter_?”

Tifa narrowed her eyes. “A high-wire man,” she shot back. “A cat burglar. A velociraptor.” She stepped closer with every word – every title branded into Cloud’s identity – peppering him like grapeshot. “We need a _dancer_.”

 _You have one,_ Cloud wanted to say. But Zack had left that life, and Cloud had left this one. Still, he turned to Zack nonetheless, feeling the heavy curtain of his frown struggle to lift as he tried for pleading puppydog (well, feral-mutt) eyes. He knew they didn’t work with his bone structure or altogether demeanour, but he watched Zack relent nonetheless: raising a pizza box like a shield.

“What we need is lunch,” he insisted. “Come on, war stories are better over takeout.”

But the takeout took hours to work through, and the four of them spent that time in determined silence, with only the clatter of the good silver on the antique plates to percuss the dead air of their quartet. By the time Cloud dared to lift his voice from the tight wad of muscle constricting his throat, the light streaming through Aerith’s murder board was tinged with construction-orange sunset.

It was Aerith who broke the stillness, with a hissy sigh; she sounded remarkably like a can of hairspray, and indeed, Cloud felt himself stiffen at the sound. “Another story on the _Muzen_ ,” she huffed. “If we don’t act soon—”

“ _De Muzen_?” The splutter fell unbidden from Cloud’s lips, and dropped with the ungainly weight of a failed grande plié to disrupt their unmoving quadrille. Lunafreya Fleuret’s _De Muzen_ was regarded by many as the greatest work of the Renaissance, her use of lighting setting a precent for Rembrandt and Vermeer and all the Tenebraean masters to succeed her, and her subject matter approaching the Surrealist centuries before Apollinaire would even discover psychedelic drugs. Her greatest love letter to the antiquity, Fleuret’s nine cherubic Muses danced on more ultramarine than even the church could have afforded, all serene smiles and sissone leaps as they serenaded the constellation Lyra. However, Fleuret’s Muses had also been stolen from the Shinra family’s auction house a few weeks ago – and nobody knew where it was.

“The Shinras want it back,” said Aerith simply. “And they’ve got their list of suspects.” Cloud cocked an eyebrow, lifting his engraved silver fork to the light of the dining room’s elaborate crystal chandelier.

“They think you have it,” Cloud surmised. “Well, do you?”

Zack leaned forward, grinning from ear to pearl-studded ear. “We will once we’ve stolen it,” he said. But when Cloud simply held his gaze – clutching at it desperately as he felt his guts shoot toward the floor – the smile faded. “We have no choice not to,” he said, his voice small. “They . . . they know.”

Once more, Cloud felt the memory burn, the warring images of brilliant paintings and his friends’ scared faces prickling tears from behind his eyelids. “The Modeoheim job.”

“And countless others,” Tifa snarled. “They know us, Cloud. The Neues, the Crown Jewels, that dinosaur back in primary seven – every job we’ve pulled since we were _kids_ is a life sentence waiting to be given. And they have all of that on us! Do you want a fucking _Shinra_ signing your death warrant?”

What Cloud _wanted_ was to go home: to curl up with his foam roller and some chocolate milk and to leave the past where he’d stashed it, in the back rooms of so many galleries, stolen paintings never quite artful enough to see the light of day again. But when his gaze swept across the room, he saw his stricken face reflected countless times: in the facets of stolen crystal, in wide, glittering eyes, and in their owners’ fearful expressions, carefully choreographed to match his own. The dark wood of the table was as cold and unforgiving as the ocean, and he felt the fateful pizza he’d forced down rock uneasily on its tide.

“I need to be excused,” said Cloud, at last.

With a blizzard coming in from the seafront and violent winds threatening to uproot Kalm’s bus depot where it stood, Aerith insisted Cloud stay the night – and that it didn’t mean he was agreeing to anything, really, truly. He’d been awarded the second-floor drawing room in lieu of a guest bedroom, a sleeping bag thrown unceremoniously over the back of a gilded rococo sofa, and Tifa had thrown in a set of novelty waffle pyjamas to complete the picture.

Cloud was, despite himself, eager to change: to strip off the day’s doubts and wad them in the corner under his _“bed.”_ As he did, he heard a _“thud”_ bounce off of the floor, followed shortly by a delicate tap. A ballet-branded lighter, and the cigarette that girl had gotten in exchange for Aerith’s flowers. His last _Nutcracker_ had only been a day ago – less! – but it felt like lifetimes; though his head had yet to stop spinning, Cloud doubted he could land a single pirouette if he tried.

The drawing room didn’t have a balcony, but its window opened over a wide ledge and sturdy-looking shingles, and the drainpipe was in port de bras distance. From the vantage point of his own window, and with only the dim glow of his cigarette to cut through the gloom, Cloud hoped that the velvet curtains drawn over the window behind the nearest balcony meant its occupants had gone to sleep.

But he had no such luck. As he clambered across the roof, Cloud saw a shock of dark hair catch what little moonlight had peeked out behind the storm clouds, gleaming like diamonds on jeweller’s velvet. Though Cloud was by all accounts too far away to see Zack’s eyes, his imagination was quick to add the notion of sapphires to the mental image, and Cloud debated just jumping off the roof.

“Been a while since we had a rooftop rendezvous,” said Zack, as Cloud – deciding against the shattered ankles that were sure to meet him if he jumped – finished his climb onto the balcony, sickling his lines to steady his stance on the railing. “Takes you right back to l’Académie, doesn’t it?”

“I like to think we’ve changed some, since then,” Cloud mused. The fog of his words mingled carelessly from the smoke of a cigarette he didn’t even want, the clouds of the latter quashing the steam’s pearly glow. “You certainly have,” he added. Zack frowned, shifting on his seat. When he turned to face the night sky, the lone pearl earring winking from behind his messy hair, his friendly features seemed all wide, hard angles. Cloud noticed a catch to his sharp jawline: a cross-shaped scar waxed and waned on his chin as he rolled his lips.

. . . As he rolled his lips around a cigarette: one Cloud hadn’t even noticed him nick. He took a halfhearted drag, and then flicked it into the snow below. “I guess I have,” said proud non-smoker Zack, fighting for a grin. “You know I died?”

“Oh?”

“Nine months ago. I was killed in action at Fort Condor. Very tragic.”

“I’m sure.” Two storeys below, Cloud watched a tiny red ember disappear into the navy expanse of the December night. “Tell Aerith I’m sorry for her loss.”

“I’m sorry for yours,” said Zack. “This job is life and death, Cloud, and not the tax fraud kind.”

“I don’t think I’m good enough.” It wasn’t a lie, but the pout Zack flashed at the sentiment made it feel like it was. Once again, the signature smile he mustered up was dying-lightbulb weak.

“The fact that you’re even considering that means you’re thinking about the job, doesn’t it?”

Cloud didn’t need to answer – he never did, not with Zack. So instead, he leaned back against the balcony door, letting the chill seep from the hoarfrost into the honeycomb cracks of his bones, knitting them ever closer together.Above him, the sky seemed to have taken the same cue, snowflakes and halfheartedly scattered stars inching closer together behind the white glare of the storm clouds. Cloud was almost sitting upright when he finally spoke. “When do we start?” he heard himself ask.

“Bright and early Sunday morning,” said Zack. When he smiled in earnest, the silvery webbing of the scar on his chin seemed to wink. “We’ll be going to a funeral – how do you feel about flowers?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> clack? sorry i thought u said crack

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tungle.hellsite](https://gidget-goes.tumblr.com) for sporadic fic updates


End file.
